I can see why so many people love this game but my god it has problems, not even touching on the story that just kind of happens around you without really making sense. I played the original back when I was a kid, and was looking forward to some arcade-y action. This game kept the PS1 control imprecision and terrible Godzilla forced perspective (is that aircraft carrier far away or is itI can see why so many people love this game but my god it has problems, not even touching on the story that just kind of happens around you without really making sense. I played the original back when I was a kid, and was looking forward to some arcade-y action. This game kept the PS1 control imprecision and terrible Godzilla forced perspective (is that aircraft carrier far away or is it twice the size of my plane and I'm about to smack into it?) while throwing exponentially more targets at you and tossing your plane around with a bunch of kart-racer level weather effects. There's gold here, and when you run a mission well you feel like a demigod, but it's all buried under layers of inexplicably bad design decisions and a control scheme that hasn't changed since analog sticks were introduced.
Easily the worst part of this game is the lock on feature. You have to manually cycle targets all using one button, and the computer has no preference between selecting a craft on your nose within weapons range or a lone antiair gun on the far horizon. The most effective antiair defence the enemy has is burying the targets you're actually trying to shoot at in other low-priority targets that you then have to mash triangle to try and select all while performing evasive maneuvers and such. There have been numerous times I've had perfect lines on targets then either didn't get around to targeting them in time or mashed past. There is no previous target button, and the d-pad is left unmapped. Even then, you can fiddle with the controls a bit but I found myself struggling to work all the controls effectively and keep a grip on my controller, and I have pretty big hands. This would be a non-issue with the ability to remap the controls better/use the right stick for something other than free look, but that's not a thing for some reason. Neither is it a thing to be able to use the plane's external camera and have an attitude indicator displayed, meaning that if you appreciate being able to see more than what feels like a sixty degree cone in front of your plane and you fly into a cloud/sandstorm/stormfront and lose visibility, you have to switch cameras to check your plane's orientation, which means pulling your thumb off the guns/targeting. You also launch flares with L3+R3, something I had to check online to figure out (I also learned about PSMs and the lock-on zoom here, because the game refuses to tell you about any of this stuff) which if you accidentally don't depress L3 down enough because you're constantly maneuvering, it just changes your camera.
So the controls are archaic and very poorly explained, which makes the crushed perspective a hundred times worse. The ground texture looks like low res aerial photographs. This alongside the miniaturized model enemies caused me to repeatedly plow into the ground thinking I had space to maneuver until the moment before I smash into it. It should also be noted that the jets don't really perform like jets. They have a normal (uncharacteristically slow and wide) turning radius, but you can feather the accelerator to initiate a """High-G turn""" which is basically just an air drift. This encourages a weird style of flight where you're constantly accelerating so you can pump the brakes and turn faster, instead of just slowing down and being able to consistently perform hard turns. While it simplifies piloting somewhat and reduces on having to learn maneuvers (which the game is completely unwilling to teach you), it also encourages you to fly sloppily and perform maneuvers that transition fantastically into slamming into the ground at speed. Clean flight doesn't really matter though as many levels have weather hazards that 1) only apply to your plane and 2) feel like kart racer obstacles added to make your life harder. There's "high winds" that instantly accelerate your plane sideways at three times its' maximum velocity, there's "thunderclouds" that sit between 100-1000 feet off the ground that arbitrarily stall you and turn your instruments off for a minute, there's clouds that work as free chaff for enemy planes. Hell, halfway through the game, your IFF gets turned off and you have to "manually identify" targets by keeping your camera on them for a few seconds within a kilometer. It's even more inconsistent than early game targeting with the added bonus of being able to mistakenly target every friendly troop as well as every other enemy besides the one you want.
There's never a point where the game leans back and lets you fly, it's just a bunch of gimmick missions, usually 15 minute "blow up every target" endurance or escort slogs. If you make one mistake, sorry, back to the beginning to listen to another 15 minutes of inane chatter. I wanted to like this game so bad, but they blew it, hard. It's like Doom if shooting was fun, but aiming was incredibly frustrating, inconsistent, and gave you carpal tunnel.… Expand
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